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Friday, 8 April 2016

Home comforts

In my last post I discussed some of my ideas for my gaming table and potential scenery. I also mentioned that the theme I am aiming for is a Victorian streets table. So I want cobbled streets and in particular I want some Tudor daub and wattle buildings as the staple building type.

My plan is to have each of these as multiple story buildings, with a stone ground floor of roughly uniform size and shape. With the second and higher floors in the daub and wattle style. These can overhang and just out as if they were added by their tenants on an ad-hoc basis as their families and businesses grew.

My plan started out with building a master for the stone works. I could see the town planners quickly throwing these down in a uniform pattern as they would be the expensive, but sturdy part of the build. With the rest going up as needed. Now carving stone and bricks into foam is a laborious and thankless task. So I built a foam master that I plan to mould and cast. The upper floors can then be assembled with foamboard as needed.

Here are some pics:In this pic you can see the first wall being carved. The plan is to have each door on a step. This is a little trick to help confuse the eye with scale. Some of the Malifaux minis are quite tall. By raising the door on a step it is easier to have the doors taller than models without making the doors take up too much room.

Plus in older buildings the doors were actually pretty small.

This was the start of the carving process on the next wall. You can see where I added lines to give a rough idea of the size of the stones. When I carve the actual stones I am happy to deviate from these to give different shapes and sizes.

Here is the various walls coming together.
I have no desire to make the buildings accessible on the inside. I dont want to build furniture and interior stairs and sizes. It is not worth the effort. So the actual footprint of the buildings is relatively small so as not to dominate the table.

Here is a shot of the carved walls in place. You can see that I have marked out areas for doors and windows. I do not want these in the master. I will add them as I need for each piece to give them their own uniqueness.

This is from a different angle.

Next up I carved up some master doors. I also carved into the master so that the doors would be recessed into the wall. I need to have a look through a bead or doll shop to find some decent pieces for door knobs, rings, handles etc.

Here you can see the recessed door and a step.

And a slightly blurry pic of the door on the side.

I need to make a plan for the windows. I might go for wooden shutters. Or looking at doing something with some granny grating.